YouTube Is Now Labelling Music As AI — And You Don't Set The Flag

On Wednesday the 14th of October, YouTube Music began labelling songs made primarily with generative AI.

The part worth understanding: the label is driven by a metadata field on the delivery, not by anything in your account. You almost certainly don't set it. Your distributor does — or nobody does.

Three values, three ways in

The disclosure has three possible values: Fully Gen AI, Partly Gen AI, or No Gen AI. There are three ways it can reach YouTube:

1. A DDEX ERN 4.3.2 or later delivery, which is how most distributors send music.
2. A contains_ai column in a CSV, in Content Manager.
3. By hand, in Studio.

If a partner sends no value at all, YouTube reads it as "unknown" — and may designate the track fully or partly Gen AI from its own detection signals instead.

Where the line falls

YouTube's own examples put pitch correction and automated AI mastering in No Gen AI. But an AI-generated instrumental layer under live vocals goes in Partly Gen AI.

Read that second one again if you make electronic music. A generated bassline, pad or texture under your own performance is Partly Gen AI by that example. That line runs straight through normal practice.

And YouTube says, in its own words, that it is up to partners to interpret the Gen AI definitions provided by DDEX. So the interpretation that lands on your release is your distributor's, not yours.

What isn't stated

No penalty. No appeals process. Nothing about the effect on recommendations or payouts for music.

Worth being precise here, because it gets misquoted: YouTube did say back in May that labelling doesn't change recommendations or monetisation — but that statement was about video. Not this.

What to do this week

1. Find out what your distributor sends. Ask them directly whether they populate the Gen AI field, what they default to, and whether you can set it per release.
2. Check your own releases in Studio, if you have Content Manager access. A value you didn't set is still a value on your record.
3. Decide your own answer before someone else does. For each release: nothing generated, something generated, or mostly generated. Write it down next to the release.

That last one is the only part fully in your hands. If you keep one record per release with what's in it and who cleared what, you can answer the question the day it's asked instead of reconstructing it.

I'm not against AI tools, and this isn't legal advice — I'm a producer who runs a small label. But a flag on your music that you didn't set and can't see is worth ten minutes.